Monday, April 11, 2011

Paul Ryan is leading a crushing charge against healthcare, specifically, the availability of healthcare to those who most need it including millions of America's children. A surprising number of the populace victimized by Ryan's faux 'free market' ideology, blindly supports the exclusion of a right to be protected from the ravages of serious illnesses. Those who oppose Ryan believe guaranteed healthcare is as fundamental as the nearly universal support for the strong military that protects us from other threats to our health and well being.

Why do affected Americans refuse to stop and ask the question, 'who's making out on this deal?' Though other countries have better health care we Americans refuse to consider the alternatives because the Tea Party will label us 'unpatriotic'. How can it be unpatriotic to think about where your kids' healthcare will come from after Ryan gets through dismantling the system?

Of course, he presents his arguments with the misty eyed fervor of Abe Lincoln giving the Gettysburg address; except Lincoln was trying to preserve the Union for all, while Ryan would divide us into the have-nots and the Koch brothers. Can you imagine how well he'll be taken care of after demolishing healthcare for middle America?

The executives running private insurance companies, multinational pharmaceutical corporations and for-profit medical care facilities, are elated at ever growing profit margins, and the prospect of even greater returns as Paul Ryan shifts risk and expense from their businesses to the individual. They in turn oil the machine with billions of dollars in campaign contributions, executive compensation, payments to lobbyists, (former members of congress), and the astonishingly effective, anti-health care ad campaigns. It's no mystery that the quislings in Congress, ignore the needs and demands of constituents whose support in the long run is financially insignificant to their quest for personal wealth.

Where does all that loot come from to pay these executives, lobbyists, and the ad agencies? Of course it's most of every dollar we pay for healthcare no matter how we buy it as the system is currently configured.

Worse than Ryan, (he makes no excuses for pandering to the monied elite ), are the so called Democratic members of both houses. They meekly abide the lies, the misrepresentation of facts and the lobbyists' spin, so they can 'Get Some' in the scramble for the stream of dollars sprayed in the direction of any rep and senator willing to play ball.

Worse still is 'we the people' obliviously standing by while the 'mob' running D.C. laughs up its sleeve. Our so called representatives in the bicameral legislature have no respect for us, nor should they. We do not hold them accountable for their actions and we allow them to turn our tax dollars over to the wealthiest Americans, while health care and pension services are raped to 'balance the budget'.

In an earlier day they may have feared our retaliation, made strong by aggressive union action, a free and outspoken press, and the tendency of its citizens to organize. Acknowledging Jeffersonian freedom of speech, away from a rigged electoral system, citizens once protested on a massive scale whenever our government wandered towards tyranny. But, it seems the neo-con infiltration of our government has facilitated a style of governing leading to a concentration of power and equivocation of purpose.

They have emasculated the unions, redacted transparency in government, and by engineering a coup for the control of all media, disrupted the free flow of information around which an opposition might be sustained. Paul Ryan is a pawn in a game being won by a powerful, superbly organized few, with a focused, singular agenda. The continued existence of a free and democratic United States of America has no doubt been threatened before, but never with such overt disdain for public sentiment. Healthcare is but their first major victory.